Iced tea is a beverage enjoyed by millions of people. Many tea drinkers prefer their iced tea sweetened. However, attempting to sweeten Wed tea can prove rather cumbersome because many granulated sweeteners do not readily dissolve. The restaurant industry has attempted to meet this customer demand by preparing pre-sweetened tea. Restaurants typically prepare pre-sweetened tea by manually adding sweeteners to freshly brewed hot tea which promotes dissolution of the sweeteners. Since tea is consumed in great quantities, large volumes of tea must be prepared. Manually sweetening this amount of tea is both time consuming and inconvenient.
As a result, automatic tea brewing and sweetening systems have developed. An example is U.S. Pat. No. 5,116,632 issued to Miller. The '632 patent discloses an automatic tea brewing and sweetening system which sits in a refrigerated room and has transport lines carrying the tea to a remote dispenser, usually a service station in the restaurant. This apparatus is both expensive to set up and consumes a rather large amount of space. A more practical automatic tea brewing and sweetening apparatus which has developed is similar to the ubiquitous automatic coffee makers. Specifically, automatic tea brewers similar to those made by the Bunn-O-Matic Corporation are known to exist and use a set of timers to control the brewing of unsweetened tea at a service counter. Although these automatic tea makers effectively prepare fleshly brewed tea, attempts at incorporating an automatic sweetening feature have proven difficult and have yielded inconsistent tea products. Specifically, the introduction of a liquid sweetener has not been accomplished in a manner which creates a fully mixed sweet tea and which is not prone to clogging of the sweetener delivery conduits.
From the foregoing it may be seen that there is still a need for an improved method and apparatus for automatically preparing freshly brewed and sweetened tea.